Syngenta Looks to Sensors to Boost Food and Biofuel Production

While the research is initially being conducted in laboratories, the team eventually hopes to set up RFID interrogators along an actual supply chain route—capturing data in the agricultural field and at hand-off points, such as warehouse docks, as well as at retail stores—to better understand the conditions to which the produce has been exposed, as well as how those conditions affect that product's quality. The data from the RFID reads will be downloaded for use by researchers in real-time predictive models of eventual produce quality.

The second platform is designed to track fungi in plants as they grow, thus catching a disease early in its inception, when growers can still eradicate that pathogen before it destroys all of the plants. The research is initially being conducted in a UIC laboratory. Researchers are considering using mobile phones to receive that information from sensors and forward it to an application running on a server. The third platform is a system for monitoring what happens underground while a plant is growing, such as using imaging technology known as electrical impedance tomography to display the ways in which roots absorb nutrients, thereby allowing growers to then adjust soil nutrients accordingly. Finally, the fourth platform focuses on biofuels.

For instance, sugar cane requires enzymes to break the crop down to produce the biofuel, and wireless sensors can be used to measure the presence of enzymes and then transmit that data to be stored by researchers. "Once [the technology is] proven, we will move on to the biofuels pilot plant in Queensland [Australia]," Grieves says. All four platforms would use wireless sensors, though RFID is not yet being planned for any of these three projects.

The four platforms are now being researched at the Innovation Centre, Grieve says. For the supply chain platform, he notes, "We will partner with the passive RFID manufacturers in the future." According to Grieve, the group hopes to identify the best, most inexpensive tag for the application.

Funding for the projects comes from Syngenta, the UK Technology Strategy Board, the Engineering and Physical Sciences Research Council (EPSRC) and Biotechnology and Biological Sciences Research (BBSRC).